The Lawman Takes A Wife. Anne Avery

      Chapter Two

      A shadow claimed half the light in the store.

      Molly looked up from straightening the disaster the ladies had left in their wake and found a mountain standing in her doorway. The mountain held out a hand to make sure the screen door didn’t slam shut behind him, then took a cautious step forward, squinting against the change from the bright sunlight outside.

      Slowly, she set down the drawer of buttons she’d been about to put away. Coreyanne Campbell had said the new sheriff was big, but Molly hadn’t pictured anyone quite this big. Who would have? The man stood six three in his oversized stocking feet, maybe more. He’d have to have his clothes special made for him—those broad shoulders wouldn’t fit into any ready-mades she knew of, and she’d done her best to scout out all the options for her customers.

      And his face…

      Molly’s fingers closed around the edges of the drawer.

      If the man himself was a mountain, the core of him had been made out of granite. His face was all hewn slabs and hard lines, like the stark, gray rock that jutted out of the nearby Elk Mountains. Life had slashed grooves at the side of his mouth and the corners of his eyes, but it hadn’t softened one angle of the sharp-edged nose or that uncompromising jaw.

      There was an awful lot of jaw.

      Slowly, deliberately, Molly raised her gaze to meet his.

      Gray eyes gleamed from beneath heavy lids. Even with the light behind him, shadowing his face, they seemed alive and bright and warm. Wary, almost. She had the odd sense that he took in more in one glance than most people saw in an hour of looking.

      “Good afternoon, Sheriff,” she said, “What can I do for you?”

      He snatched his hat off and, squinting, lowered his head to look for her in the shadows at the rear of the store. “Ma’am?”

      When he came forward, his movements were quiet, controlled, but that didn’t stop the floor joists from creaking in protest at the weight. She could feel the jouncing with each step he took.

      The glass in her display cases rattled softly.

      “You’re Mrs. Calhan, the proprietor of this store?” His voice rumbled up from somewhere deep in that big chest like distant thunder over the Elk Mountains. Just like the thunder, it sent a shiver of charged awareness down her spine.

      “I am. And you must be Sheriff Gavin.” She smiled. “The ladies were talking about you just this morning.”

      Too late she remembered what they’d been saying.

      His expression didn’t change, yet she sensed a tension in him that hadn’t been there a moment earlier. To cover her gaffe, she extended her hand over the counter. After a moment’s hesitation, he gingerly took it in his own large, callused paw.

      The warmth and the hard, masculine strength of that hand wrapped around hers made something inside her squeeze tight. It had been four years since Richard had died. Four long, hard and often lonely years.

      “Welcome to Elk City, Sheriff.” She slid her hand free, palm tingling from the contact. “We’re glad to have you here at last.”

      “You’ve had trouble?” The question came too quickly, as if he’d had it prepared beforehand.

      “Oh, no,” she hastily assured him. “No trouble. Not really. Not that sort of trouble. Only, if there were trouble, we’d rather have a sheriff around than not.”

      He nodded, glanced at the disordered counter, then let his gaze slide along the shelves of goods that lined the walls behind her.

      Nervous, she nudged a couple of the button boxes in the drawer on the counter in front of her. The faint clack of the buttons shifting was comfortingly normal.

      “I take it you’re introducing yourself to the shopkeepers?” she said. “That’s very commendable, such dedication to duty. And on your very first day, too.”

      That came out a little more stiffly than she’d intended. She was used to men who weren’t much on conversation—a couple of her customers shopped mostly by grunting and pointing—but she wasn’t used to being quite so aware of the male on the other side of the counter. It was…unsettling. And strangely intriguing.

      “We—the shopkeepers here in town, I mean—we’re very glad to have you. Things were getting to be so…difficult. Arguments, you know, about who was going to be sheriff and—” She smiled. “Well, let’s just say there was a good deal of discussion before the town council agreed we’d be better off getting a man with your…er, your experience.”

      Heaven help her, she’d been about to say “your reputation.” Surely it was her imagination that his shoulders stiffened as if he were expecting a blow.

      “I’m not sworn in yet,” he said, deliberately not looking at her.

      “I’m sure Mayor Andersen will take care of that little matter just as quickly as he can.”

      “Mmm.” His gaze slid from the table in the center of the store with its eye-catching stacks of tinned fruits, to the glass-fronted case where she kept the sweets, to the rack made of antlers that displayed a range of ropes and twine, then over to the artful arrangement of tin washtubs and willow baskets that she’d hung on the wall at the back.

      At the sight of a man mannequin with a rolled theatre bill in its waxen hands and sporting a ready-made suit, stiff-collared white shirt and bowler hat tipped at a rakish angle, he blinked and glanced back at her, clearly surprised.

      “Never seen a store quite like this.”

      His eyes were blue, Molly realized, not gray, as she’d thought. She wrenched her gaze from his face before it became obvious she’d been staring.

      “It’s proven very handy, putting things on display like this.” There was an odd little catch in her throat. She cleared it, tried again. If she hadn’t known it was mere foolishness, she’d have sworn she could feel the heat of him clear across the counter. “This way, folks can find what they’re looking for without me having to fetch it off some shelf or dig it out of some drawer first. Saves a lot of time for everyone.”

      She didn’t tell him it also increased her profits significantly. With so much right out in the open where customers could get their hands on it, more often than not they walked out of the store with at least one or two things they hadn’t intended to buy but hadn’t been able to resist. Sometimes they bought so much they forgot what they’d originally come for and had to come back to buy that, too.

      Molly smiled at the mannequin. Since she’d installed it in the store, she’d doubled her sale of men’s hats and fancy dress clothes. Sales on cravats and ties had more than tripled and showed no sign of slacking. She’d already started to look for a child-size mannequin to go with it.

      She hadn’t bothered with a female form since there were cheaper ways of tempting her women customers.

      The sheriff wasn’t interested in mannequins any more than the rope and twine. His gaze swung back to the glass-fronted display case where she kept her candies and sweets.

      Without speaking, he walked over, making the floorboards groan at every step. Staying safely on her side of the broad counter, Molly followed.

      “Saw